Rules Call

We just finishing scheduling our annual "rules call" for our fantasy league. We use doodle.com to find a time when everyone is available. We've struggled for years as to which technology is best for holding the conversation (since we're all in different locations). This year we're going with freeconferencecall.com - I'd really like to use a google+ hangout, but I think the installation and the 'first time' for people might make it tricky for the whole group. We'll be discussing everything from 'do we still want to have 4 sports we compete in' to what the league costs/awards to the rules for each sport to anything else we can think of. Should be fun - not as fun as a draft, but still something to look forward to!

Lincecum

I'm beginning to hear player by player analysis, which is great! Most experts agreed that Lincecum would struggle last year and it turned out to be mostly true. Now I'm hearing that he might be a value this year. I think I'll agree because the numbers picked up in the second half and stayed fairly consistent. So, I'll be in on the bidding for lincecum this year and not staying away like I did last year.

Baseball Prep

I was listening to some of the recap of the FSTA draft tonight on Sirius XM Fantasy Radio. I found this link with the results of that snake draft - http://www.rtsports.com/SiriusXM - of course the analysis is the more interesting part. I heard some talk about 'stars n scrubs' vs the balanced approach, it appears that most experts prefer the balanced approach, which I do think I'll employ in our auction draft this year. I'll probably skip the magazines again this year and go with Scott Engel's rotoexperts predictions - http://rotoexperts.com/category/mlb/

NCAAB Strategy

Late January, right as the football playoffs are wrapping up, is when I start to dvr as many ncaab games as possible. I'll watch the first half at 2x speed and then I'll watch the last few minutes at regular speed if its close. I can usually get a pretty good feel for the top 25 this way. Then right after valentines day I create "the Hovell index" which is documented on Wikipedia. The Hovell index had a run of predicting the winner for like 8 straight years, but the last few years haven't been as good. The Hovell index has about 12 categories including strength of schedule, defensive rank, foul shot %, head coach strength, etc. I follow that index to the t and pick my winner. Lets see how it does this year!

Starting 2013

I just sent out the invite to the league for 2013. First, I congratulated the winners of 2013, then I used doodle.com to find out the best time for us 10 guys to get together for a 'rules call'. There's a lot to discuss in that call, we need to talk about doing our first auction draft in baseball, plus points in football, I think we should drop bowl games from our 4 sports... It seems that football points are ridiculously perfect as we had a 6 way tie for first place going into the playoffs! I've been listening to sirius xm fantasy sports talk almost every day and they're starting to talk about baseball - so its about time to decide on a strategy! I'm just listening to player by player strategy at this point...

Baseball soon

I'm starting to think about baseball. But first, one of our long time players politely backed out of the league. We have at least 3 potential backfills- two pros that want to co-manage, a big baseball fan that hasn't played fantasy baseball and a neighbor that hasn't played in awhile. Leaning towards the co-managed team, not sure if I can just make that decision or if I need to check with the rest of the league first.

Regarding baseball prep, I'm listening to xm fantasy sports and following everyone on twitter. The players' names are coming back to me quickly :) excited to play!